A Quote by Walter Lippmann
The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
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Majorities are of two sorts: (1) communal majority and (2) political majority. A political majority is changeable in its class composition. A political majority grows. A communal majority is born. The admission to a political majority is open. The door to a communal majority is closed. The politics of political majority are free to all to make and unmake. The politics of communal majority are made by its own members born in it.
A fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees ... which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one.
It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.
Above all, there is no exception to this rule: that the idea of political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority.
Democracy has turned out to be not majority rule but rule by well-organized and well-connected minority groups who steal from the majority.
The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.
Despite support from a majority of Americans, a majority of the House of Representatives, and a majority of the Senate, Keystone XL is stuck - stalled by special-interest politics.
Democracy is an experiment, and the right of the majority to rule is no more inherent than the right of the minority to rule; and unless the majority represents sane, righteous, unselfish public sentiment, it has no inherent right.
America was founded on majority rule, not supermajority rule. Somehow, over the years, this has morphed into supermajority rule, and that changes things.
I am the candidate who defends the superiority of politics over the administration, the bureaucracy, the economy, and so I think it is politics which must decide.
Here is your government at work. A congressman from Colorado said he wants to draft a rule that would make it unethical to have a sexual relationship with an intern. Only Congress would need a rule to tell them cheating on their wives is not ethical. Don't we have that rule? I believe it's called the Sixth Commandment.
I'm afraid that in the United States of America today the prevailing doctrine of justification is not justification by faith alone. It is not even justification by good works or by a combination of faith and works. The prevailing notion of justification in our culture today is justification by death. All one has to do to be received into the everlasting arms of God is to die.
In the past, the respect people had for religion meant that ethical practice was maintained through a majority following one religion or another. But this is no longer the case. We must therefore find some other way of establishing basic ethical principles.
The politics of envy is the politics of this commandment: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." It is the politics of two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.
After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.
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